Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spent January 31 in Kyiv underscoring American support for Ukraine, including in its struggle against Russian aggression. While Pompeo brought no major deliverables, just showing up proved enough for the Ukrainians.

The U.S. government should now follow up with steps to strengthen the U.S.-Ukraine relationship, which has been stressed by President Donald Trump’s bid to drag Ukraine’s leadership into U.S. politics.

A ROUGH PATCH FOR U.S.-UKRAINE RELATIONS

2019 was not the best year for U.S.-Ukraine relations. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, elected in April, found himself pressured to launch an investigation into a long-discredited corruption claim about former Vice President Joe Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter, in order to benefit Trump’s reelection bid. In the process, the White House withheld an Oval Office visit from Zelenskiy and, for a time, congressionally-approved U.S. military assistance.

Zelenskiy managed to walk a narrow path carefully. He did not contradict Trump by saying there was pressure. Why would he? He and Ukraine had nothing to gain by alienating the American president. At the same time, authorities in Kyiv did not announce Trump’s desired investigation. Doing so would have unraveled the bipartisan support that Ukraine has enjoyed in Congress for nearly three decades.

Against this backdrop, the Ukrainians warmly welcomed the secretary of state’s visit. Pompeo, who had canceled planned visits in November and earlier in January, became the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Kyiv in two-and-a-half years (Vice President Mike Pence reportedly was instructed by Trump not to attend Zelenskiy’s inauguration last May).

Kyiv was so eager to host Pompeo that Ukrainian officials overlooked the secretary’s faux pas a week before his arrival. In an interview with National Public Radio’s Mary Louise Kelly, Pompeo took umbrage when she raised Ukraine and questioned the secretary’s failure to speak up for U.S. officials called to testify in Trump’s impeachment hearings. An angry Pompeo asked: “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?”

THE RIGHT MESSAGES

Pompeo’s visit aimed to show Ukrainians — and Moscow — that Americans do care. As Kyiv think-tanker Alyona Hetmanchuk correctly predicted: “Pompeo will pretend that he didn’t say anything, and his Ukrainian counterparts will pretend that they didn’t hear anything.”

Pompeo had meetings with Zelenskiy, Foreign Minister Vadim Prystaiko, and Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk. The secretary had no major new announcements, but his public remarks following his meeting with Zelenskiy struck the right notes from the Ukrainian perspective:

• “The United States sees that the Ukrainian struggle for freedom, democracy, and prosperity is a valiant one. Our commitment to support it will not waver.”
• “We have maintained support for Ukraine’s efforts to join NATO and move closer to the European Union.”
• “In July of 2018, we released the Crimea Declaration, which clearly stated that Crimea is part of Ukraine and the United States will never recognize Russia’s attempts to annex it. We will never accept anything less than the full restoration of Ukraine’s control over its sovereign territory.”

In addition to meetings with Ukrainian officials, Pompeo laid a wreath in honor of Ukrainian soldiers who have died fighting Russian and Russian proxy forces the past six years in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas. He later visited wounded soldiers.

The secretary’s words, wreath-laying, and hospital visit made the day a good one for Ukrainians anxious for reaffirmation of U.S. support. The only discordant note: The secretary ducked a question as to when Zelenskiy could visit Washington. Zelenskiy, who received an invitation from Trump last May, but no specific date, made clear his readiness to travel.

NEXT STEPS

Pompeo’s visit went some way to reassure Ukrainians. Never fully confident in Trump’s view of their country, they became more nervous about the depth and resilience of American support last fall as the impeachment drama played out in Washington. The U.S. government and Pompeo should follow up on his visit with steps to bolster the relationship and Ukraine’s confidence.

First, the president should quickly nominate an ambassador to Ukraine. Since Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s unjust early recall last spring, the U.S. mission in Kyiv has been led by chargés d’affaires. The current chargé is a very able and experienced career Foreign Service officer, but Ukrainians can be forgiven for thinking that the absence of a confirmed ambassador means that the United States does not care as much as it should.

Interestingly, during his February 1 visit to Belarus, Pompeo expressed hope that there would soon be an American ambassador in Minsk. Ukraine matters much more to U.S. policy interests than does Belarus. Pompeo should propose a name for Kyiv to the White House and urge the president to make a rapid decision.

Second, the secretary should task Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun, who took up his office in early January, to devote some of his time to Russia and Ukraine. Deputy secretaries at the State Department typically have one or two regional questions in their direct portfolio. Biegun knows the post-Soviet region well. He spent time in Moscow during the 1990s. He is familiar with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, having taken part in a Track II effort to promote a settlement.

The State Department has indicated that it does not intend to replace Ambassador Kurt Volker, who resigned in September from his position as special envoy for Ukraine negotiations. The department apparently plans to have the slack taken up by diplomats such as Acting Assistant Secretary Phil Reeker, who has deep European experience, and Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent, who knows Ukraine as well as anyone at State. Adding Biegun to the mix would signal heightened U.S. interest in facilitating an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and ensure that Ukraine gets appropriate attention from the highest levels of the State Department.

Third, the secretary should ask Trump to give Zelenskiy a specific date to come to Washington. During his time in Kyiv, Pompeo denied that there were conditions for a visit — a denial that flies in the face of testimony to Congress by current and former U.S. officials. However, what better way to make the case than by extending an invitation for Zelenskiy to visit now?

Pompeo’s visit helped put U.S.-Ukraine relations on a better track. When he returns to Washington, he should take the above actions to further bolster that relationship.

Originally on Brookings

Ukraine unhappily found itself at the center of the impeachment drama that played out in Washington last fall and during the first weeks of 2020. That threatened the resiliency of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship, a relationship that serves the interests of both countries.

With Donald Trump’s impeachment trial now in the past, Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainians undoubtedly hope that their country will no longer feature so prominently in U.S. domestic politics. That would be good, but it may not happen.

Last year, Trump sought to get senior Ukrainian officials to announce an investigation of a political rival and extorted Kyiv to do so by withholding military assistance and a White House visit. Revelations of those actions led to the third presidential impeachment in American history. Last week, Republican senators voted to find Trump not guilty, disregarding damning testimony, rejecting further witnesses, and ignoring a courageous floor speech by their colleague Mitt Romney.

The impeachment hearings and trial proved a difficult time for Ukraine and for its friends in America. It had to be especially painful for Ukrainians to hear reports that the U.S. president referred to their country as a “terrible place” with “terrible people” and one of the “most corrupt countries.”

Impeachment is now over, but Ukraine may find itself again an object in U.S. politics, as America ramps up for the November presidential election.

Start with Trump. Rejecting the analysis of the U.S. intelligence community, State Department and Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, the president has bought fully into the Kremlin disinformation lie that it was Ukraine—not Russia—that interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “They [Ukrainians] tried to take me down.” Mr. Trump revels in playing the victim. As the campaign heats up, he almost certainly will depict himself as the victim of the “Ukraine hoax.” He will repeat the falsehood that the Ukrainian government organized an effort to sabotage his 2016 bid for the presidency.

If anyone believes Trump will let this go, or that the impeachment experience left him somewhat chastened, look at how he has behaved in the week since his acquittal.

Then there is Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who oversaw the effort to extort Kyiv. He wants to drag Ukraine into U.S. domestic politics. He continues pursuit of the discredited claim that former Vice President Joe Biden sought to have Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin fired to protect his son, and he is not going away. Attorney General William Barr said he would take information provided by Giuliani, even though Giuliani himself reportedly is under U.S. Department of Justice investigation.

In the Senate, Lindsey Graham plans to conduct hearings to investigate the Bidens and their connection to corruption in Ukraine. Mr. Graham, who has become one of the president’s biggest cheerleaders, seeks to boost Mr. Trump’s reelection prospects.

So Ukraine may find itself again enmeshed in American politics. How should Kyiv respond?

First, Zelensky and the Ukrainian government should keep walking that narrow path that they have walked successfully over the past five months: say or do nothing that would antagonize either Trump or Democrats in the Congress.

The Ukrainian president can continue to stay silent when Trump asserts that he said there was no pressure; Ukraine gains nothing by contradicting and alienating the U.S. president. By the same token, the Ukrainian government should not announce or launch bogus investigations, which would undermine the strong bipartisan support that Ukraine has enjoyed in both the House of Representatives and Senate for nearly three decades. This is a real asset for Ukraine, which should do nothing that would risk it.

Second, Kyiv should work to change the unflattering narrative that has taken hold in the United States. It has good news stories to tell. The Ukrainian government and Rada should work to get members of the House and Senate, particularly Republicans, to visit and see for themselves how the country is changing. Kyiv should send some of the bright young faces in government and Rada to Washington to tell their country’s story, not just in the halls of Congress but on CNN, PBS, Fox News and MSNBC.

Third, Ukraine’s political leadership should take steps that will reinforce the story of a country changing for the better, despite being the victim of Russian aggression: press the fight against corruption; enact and implement land reform; get back on program with the International Monetary Fund, which offers low-interest credits and a seal of approval that will help attract foreign investment.

After the last half-year, few in Ukraine presumably want their country again in the middle of American politics. If that nevertheless happens, Kyiv needs to position itself to avert damage to U.S.-Ukraine relations or to Ukraine’s image in the United States.

Steven Pifer, a William Perry research fellow at Stanford University, served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000.

Originally in the Kyiv Post

A Q&A with Professor Stephen Stedman, who serves as the Secretary General of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.

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At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the Commission which includes FSI’s Nathaniel Persily, Alex Stamos, and Toomas Ilves, launched a new report, Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age. The report takes an in-depth look at the challenges faced by democracy today and makes a number of recommendations as to how best to tackle the threats posed by social media to free and fair elections. On Tuesday, February 25, professors Stedman and Persily will discuss the report’s findings and recommendations during a lunch seminar from 12-1:15 PM. To learn more and to RSVP, visit the event page.

Q: What are some of the major findings of the report? Are digital technologies a threat to democracy?

Steve Stedman: Our report suggests that social media and the Internet pose an acute threat to democracy, but probably not in the way that most people assume. Many people believe that the problem is a diffuse one based on excess disinformation and a decline in the ability of citizens to agree on facts. We too would like the quality of deliberation in our democracy to improve and we worry about how social media might degrade democratic debate, but if we are talking about existential threats to democracy the problem is that digital technologies can be weaponized to undermine the integrity of elections.

When we started our work, we were struck by how many pathologies of democracy are said to be caused by social media: political polarization; distrust in fellow citizens, government institutions and traditional media; the decline in political parties; democratic deliberation, and on and on. Social media is said to lessen the quality of democracy because it encourages echo chambers and filter bubbles where we only interact with those who share our political beliefs. Some platforms are said to encourage extremism through their algorithms.

What we found, instead, is a much more complex problem. Many of the pathologies that social media are said to create – for instance, polarization, distrust, and political sorting begin their trendlines before the invention of the Internet, let alone the smart phone. Some of the most prominent claims are unsupported by evidence, or are confounded by conflicting evidence. In fact, we say that some assertions simply cannot be judged without access to data held by the tech platforms.

Instead, we rely on the work of scholars like Yochai Benkler and Edda Humphries to argue that not all democracies are equally vulnerable to network propaganda and disinformation. It is precisely where you have high pre-existing affective polarization, low trust, and hyperpartisan media, that digital technologies can intensify and amplify polarization.

Elections and toxic polarization are a volatile mix. Weaponized disinformation and hate speech can wreak havoc on elections, even if they don’t alter the vote tallies. This is because democracies require a system of mutual security. In established democracies political candidates and followers take it for granted that if they lose an election, they will be free to organize and contest future elections. They are confident that the winners will not use their power to eliminate them or disenfranchise them. Winners have the expectation that they hold power temporarily, and accept that they cannot change the rules of competition to stay in power forever. In short, mutual security is a set of beliefs and norms that turn elections from being a one-shot game into a repeated game with a long shadow of the future.

In a situation already marred by toxic polarization, we fear that weaponized disinformation and hate speech can cause parties and followers to believe that the other side doesn’t believe in the rules of mutual security. The stakes become higher. Followers begin to believe that losing an election means losing forever. The temptation to cheat and use violence increases dramatically. 

Q: As far as political advertising, the report encourages platforms to provide more transparency about who is funding that advertising. But it also asks that platforms require candidates to make a pledge that they will avoid deceptive campaign practices when purchasing ads. It also goes as far as to recommend financial penalties for a platform if, for example, a bot spreading information is not labelled as such. Some platforms might argue that this puts an unfair onus on them. How might platforms be encouraged to participate in this effort?

SS: The platforms have a choice: they can contribute to toxic levels of political polarization and the degradation of democratic deliberation, or they can protect electoral integrity and democracy. There are a lot of employees of the platforms who are alarmed at the state of polarization in this country and don’t want their products to be conduits of weaponized disinformation and hate speech. You saw this in the letter signed by Facebook employees objecting to the decision by Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook would treat political advertising as largely exempt from their community standards. If ever there were a moment in this country that we should demand that our political parties and candidates live up to a higher ethical standard it is now. Instead Facebook decided to allow political candidates to pay to run ads even if the ads use disinformation, tell bald-faced lies, engage in hate speech, and use doctored video and audio. Their rationale is that this is all part of “the rough and tumble of politics.” In doing so, Facebook is in the contradictory position that it has hundreds of employees working to stop disinformation and hate speech in elections in Brazil and India, but is going to allow politicians and parties in the United States to buy ads that can use disinformation and hate speech.

Our recommendation gives Facebook an option that allows political advertisement in a way that need not enflame polarization and destroy mutual security among candidates and followers: 1.) Require that candidates, groups or parties who want to pay for political advertising on Facebook sign a pledge of ethical digital practices; 2.) Then use the standards to determine if an ad meets the pledge or not. If an ad uses deep fakes, if an ad grotesquely distorts the facts, if an ad out and out lies about what an opponent said or did, then Facebook would not accept the ad. Facebook can either help us raise our electoral politics out of the sewer or it can ensure that our politics drowns in it.

It’s worth pointing out that the platforms are only one actor in a many-sided problem. Weaponized disinformation is actively spread by unscrupulous politicians and parties; it is used by foreign countries to undermine electoral integrity; and it is often spread and amplified by irresponsible partisan traditional media. Fox News, for example, ran the crazy conspiracy story about Hilary Clinton running a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor in DC. Individuals around the president, including the son of the first National Security Adviser tweeted the story. 

Q: While many of the recommendations focus on the role of platforms and governments, the report also proposes that public authorities promote digital and media literacy in schools as well as public interest programming for the general population. What might that look like? And how would that type of literacy help protect democracy? 

SS: Our report recommends digital literacy programs as a means to help build democratic resilience against weaponized disinformation. Having said that however, the details matter tremendously. Sam Wineburg at Stanford, who we cite, has extremely insightful ideas for how to teach citizens to evaluate the information they see on the Internet, but even he puts forward warnings: if done poorly digital literacy could simply increase citizen distrust of all media, good and bad; digital literacy in a highly polarized context begs the question of who will decide what is good and bad media. We say in passing that in addition to digital literacy we need to train citizens to understand biased assimilation of information. Digital literacy trains citizens to understand who is behind a piece of information and who benefits from it. But we also need to teach citizens to stand back and ask, “why am I predisposed to want to believe this piece of information?”

Q: Obviously access to data is critical for researchers and commissioners to do their work, analysis and reporting. One of the recommendations asks that public authorities compel major internet platforms to share meaningful data with academic institutions. Why is it so important for platforms and academia to share information?

SS: Some of the most important claims about the effects of social media can’t be evaluated without access to the data. One example we cite in the report is the controversy about whether YouTube’s algorithms radicalize individuals and send them down a rabbit hole of racist, nationalist content. This is a common claim and has appeared on the front pages of the New York Times. The research supporting the claim, however, is extremely thin, and other research disputes it. What we say is that we can’t adjudicate this argument unless YouTube were to share its data, so that researchers can see what the algorithm is doing. There are similar debates concerning the effects of Facebook. One of our commissioners, Nate Persily, has been at the forefront of working with Facebook to provide certified researchers with privacy protected data – Social Science One. Progress has been so slow that the researchers have lost patience. We hope that governments can step in and compel the platforms to share the data.

Q: This is one of the first reports to look at this problem in the Global South. Is the problem more or less critical there?

SS: Kofi Annan was very concerned that the debate about digital technologies and democracy was far too focused on Europe and the United States. Before Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in the United States and Brexit elections of 2016, its predecessor company had manipulated elections in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. There is now a transnational industry in election manipulation.

What we found does not bode well for democracies in the rest of the world. The factors that make democracies vulnerable to network propaganda and weaponized disinformation are often present in the Global South: pre-existing polarization, low trust, and hyperpartisan traditional media. Many of these democracies already have a repertoire of electoral violence. 

On the other hand, we did find innovative partnerships in Indonesia and Mexico where Election Management Bodies, civil society organizations, and traditional media cooperated to fight disinformation during elections, often with success. An important recommendation of the report is that greater attention and resources are needed for such efforts to protect electoral integrity in the Global South. 

About the Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

 As one of his last major initiatives, in 2018 Kofi Annan convened the Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age. The Commission includes members from civil society and government, the technology sector, academia and media; across the year 2019 they examined and reviewed the opportunities and challenges for electoral integrity created by technological innovations. Assisted by a small secretariat at Stanford University and the Kofi Annan Foundation, the Commission has undertaken extensive consultations and issue recommendations as to how new technologies, social media platforms and communication tools can be harnessed to engage, empower and educate voters, and to strengthen the integrity of elections. Visit  the Kofi Annan Foundation and the Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age for more on their work.